Sunday, August 14, 2011

Following recent civil unrest, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has appointed the founder and patron of the the UK based Centre for Social Justice and former leader of the Conservative Party, the Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, to jointly lead a cross-government programme of action to deal with Britain’s violent street gang culture. Noel Pearson described Smith as, 'the first politician, and first senior public servant, who has struck me as having a profound understanding of social disadvantage at the ground level'. Smith is someone who is having an influence under the banner of social justice. For more information on the views espoused by Smith and the Centre for Social Justice read the report, Dying to Belong (2009)

In 1961, barely two years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the country mobilised a mass literacy campaign with few parallels in the twentieth century. It has since been influential in national literacy campaigns in Chile during the Allende years and Sandinista Nicaragua, popular education in Colombia and El Salvador, and most recently in East Timor and Venezuela.

Other supporting materials can be found on the literacy page of this blog

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The AEDI is a population measure of children’s development in communities across Australia. A Snapshot of Early Childhood Development in Australia - AEDI National AEDI Report 2009 presents a summary of the AEDI results for Australia and each state and territory. The report has been reissued in 2011 following a small follow-up data collection and some minor enhancements to the data-set

Who was Maybanke Anderson?

Maybanke Anderson (1845-1927), also known as Maybanke Wolstenholme) was a feminist, teacher, historian and writer. Not only was she a central driving force behind women's suffrage in New South Wales, she campaigned tirelessly for progressive social reform through the establishment of free kindergartens, children's playgrounds, sex education and adult education.Listen to more about her in Gardens for children and workshops for classrooms: Maybanke Anderson, Norman Selfe and the New Education, an ABC Radio National program.